Vista's not that bad, but it's disappointing because of what it _could_ have been. Microsoft took about 5 years to make Vista. Besides eye candy, what does Vista have that XP doesn't? I don't think it has much more to offer. Microsoft removed a lot of features that were originally planned for the OS (WinFS for one).
I remember back when they were making all the hype about Longhorn, it was supposed to be a (nearly) complete rewrite of a new "Windows" OS with all these new useful features. In the end, it just seems to be a rehash of XP with a face lift. I guess I wouldn't say Vista is a bad operating system, but it's disappointing that Microsoft couldn't have come up with anything better after so long in development.
What features does Vista have that you can't find in an Operating System that already exists? I remember seeing a video on youtube comparing Vista with OS X with the search features, picture/video, etc and it's "not the same". I mean, Vista's search is in the bottom left corner, and OS X's is in the top right corner! I'd do a search for the video but youtube and google video is blocked here at the office.
As part of the installation, Microsoft Windows could provide the user with a radio-button list of possible browsers they can install, and the option of "other" where they can enter a URL to a direct download. The list of browsers, and "other" could be downloaded through a utility similar to wget in Linux from the commandline via a system call.
That way the user can pick what they want, but the binaries for the browsers aren't actually provided on the Windows CD.
Not that hard.
When I read the skydiving parachute test story, I understood it as... they dropped the parachute out of the plane with only a camera attached, then after the chute crashed on the ground, they had to reassmeble it and rescue the video feed to try and find out why the parachute failed (not taking into account that there wasn't an actual human attached to the parachute that could pull the cord.)
Video cameras can't open parachutes, so of course the test would fail. How many engineers does it take to figure that one out?
Check out the Mono Project. Mono is a.NET implementation on Linux. You will need to make some source code changes to get it to work in Mono, but a lot of the code should work out of the box.
I used Mono to port an in-house application we use here at the office into Mono. Our aplication is in C#, but I believe mono will also do ASP.NET. Someone correct me if I'm wrong? I only had to do some minor code changes to get a majority of our.NET application to work under Gentoo and Ubuntu. Some features had to be disabled, like ActiveX of course. I don't believe ActiveX is supported.
And, most interestingly, are OSes at this point no longer necessary?... In ten years will we all be running applications via the internet?
Operating systems will always be necessary, in some form or another. Even if all applications will be run via the Internet, the computer (or thin client, or whatever) that you are using needs an operating system in order to control the internet browser (it is an application after all) that is used to view and use these Internet apps.
Maybe in 10 years, the BIOS itself could possibly contain the entire kernel, drivers, and basic web browser to get you online so you can access these web apps, but even then, wouldn't that firmware still be considered an operating system? It would still handle memory management, I/O, et cetera.
Mod parent up! A lot of people complain about how mainstream distros are getting so bloated because they often come on 3-6 CDs, but they don't take into account how much extra software is included on the CDs. Most if not all of these CDs provide an OS installation that allows you to select what software you want to install and what you don't want.
I have my Gaim clients disconnected most of the time because, even when I'm flagged as "busy", friends of mine come at inappropriate times for some cheap talk, and I have to be kinda rude rude and tell them: I'M WORKING! WE'LL TALK LATER!
That's what I like about how I have Trillian configured. When a user IMs me, the only thing that happens on my desktop is I get a flashing notification icon in my buddy list. The IM window is hidden completely, and only shows when I click that notification icon. We use AIM at work to talk both in-company and with friends/family. If I'm busy at work, I can put up an away message and minimize Trillian. That way I don't even know I'm getting an IM unless I restore Trillian or happen to notice the tiny flashing icon in the systray.
I'm not sure I agree about the part with converting game money to real-world money. If I travel to Europe, scam locals out of hundreds of thousands of Euros, then come back to the US and convert this money to US dollars, where do I get punished? Europe? The USA? Both? In this case, both Euros and US Dollars have real value so of course I should be punished somewhere.
In an online game, in-game assets don't have any value outside of the game... unless the developers specifically design a way in the game to convert these assets to local currency, and SUPPORT IT. As others have said, Monopoply money has no real world value, so if I steal it, I shouldn't go to jail. If I steal casino chips from someone in Vegas, I SHOULD go to jail.
There are plenty of techniques and schemes people can do in these online games that other players don't like. Take Silkroad Online for example. In this game, you can be a trader to do trade runs between cities for in-game gold profits. If a thief in the game were to "1-star pop" your trade run, stealing around 55,000 gold worth of loot, should this be punishable in the real world? I don't believe this technique was envisioned by the Silkroad developers, and in-game players generally frown upon the practice of 1-star popping. It is unfair to the 1-star trader because the thief is often much higher level and the trader does not stand a chance.
I think if there is no means of translating in-game items to real-world cash, supported by the developers, then real-world rules should not apply. In Silkroad, I can murder a player. Should I be put on trial in a criminal court because the player I murdered happened to be a high level player and leader of a guild that declared war on my guild because of the murder?
It's just a game.
Re:Instant msg-ing messes with grammar? As if! lol
on
It's OK to keep AIMing
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ZOMGROTFLMAOSPLOSION!!!!!111!!1!!111ONE11!!!111 you are SO wrong!!! The more exclamation marks, the better.
That's a good point. I don't think I COULD respond positively to a statement like that. I wouldn't want someone to be that involved in my home's security, monitoring my family's activities, playing with the locks, etc... but if someone was driving by and noticed my front door was open all day, or saw that I had a rope hanging out one of the bedroom windows for someone to climb, I'd want them to let me know.
I wouldn't want someone to constantly be brute forcing my ssh server, or hitting my web server with PHP exploits all day to see if there is an exploitable hole, but if someone is legitimately using my server and notices a problem, I'd like to know about it.
Well all those crimes hurt people/corporations. "Ethical hacking" is capable of occurring without causing damages. If I find a hole in a system for a remote code execution exploit, run code that simply displays a console message on a server, then determine how to fix the hole and inform the system administrator, that seems harmless. It allows the admin to find out about the hole and fix it. Now if I were to run code that roots the box and turns it into a spam bot sending millions of spam emails out wasting large amounts of bandwidth, or code to steal company data, that's another story.
Should I be penalized if I go to your house, find out how to break into it, and tell you what I found?
That is a good point. There are a lot of possibilities here. If we don't have all the facts, we shouldn't be so quick to judge. The fact of the matter is, Myspace should not be sued because it is not their responsibility to verify users' ages before those users meet offline. This case is all about the money. Next thing we'll see is teenage girls (or guys) suing malls because they met their attacker there.
Actually, I believe MySpace allows you to be a member at age 14. However, it marks all underage profiles as private (I think), so that only friends can see the information besides age, location and screen name (this includes additional pictures).
That would be correct. Myspace members who have their age set to 14 or 15 have private profiles. Only friends of that member can see their full profile and additional pictures. Of course, that doesn't mean the profile owner really is 14 or 15, but age misrepresentation is against Myspace TOS and is grounds for profile deletion.
Granted, it's terrible what happened to the girl, but how is Myspace to blame here? If someone goes to a bar, meets someone, goes back to their place, and gets assaulted, should the victim sue the bar? After all, that's where the victim met the attacker. Is this girl's family going to sue the movie theater and restaurant where they ate and watched a movie? Those businesses didn't do anything to protect her rights either... Myspace does provide *some* protection for minors, if the user is true about their age, but it is not Myspace's responsibility to screen each and every user to verify their true age. There shouldn't even be a lawsuit. Go after the attacker instead.
Well I guess from a software development standpoint, "fixing" the kernel would be the right thing to do. True, this fix does allow the virus to propagate, but the fix makes the kernel work properly. A virus is a program after all, and it should work properly in the operating system just like any other piece of software.:-)
Well configuring the computer to not boot from CD, and locking the tower in a steel cabinet is good physical security, but not everyone does that. I was under the impression that we're talking about the distro itself, whether it's Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora Core, or something else. I verified Fedora works that way with single-user and I am almost certain Mandrake 9.x and 10.0 did as well. I may check Gentoo when I get home if I remember. I wonder if any of the BSDs prompt for the root password on single-user mode. I have PC-BSD, which is basically FreeBSD 6, so I may check that one out too.
I'm sure there are some distros, like Debian, that DO prompt for the root password. Indeed it should be seen as a critical security bug to not prompt for it. Windows has the same critical bug, as in you can go into safe mode and by default it doesn't have an administrator password assigned. At least Linux HAS a root password in most cases.
It's called "single user mode", not "root me mode". Neither SuSE nor Debian will drop you into a rootshell.
Running Fedora Core 4. When I enter the Grub menu, I can edit the kernel line to go into single user mode. This drops me into a root shell, which is evident by running 'whoami' which returns 'root'. It did not ask for a password. I simply turned the machine on, told it to go into single user mode, and now I'm in a root shell without authentication. It even lets me change root's password at this point.
No. How will the user be able to boot from a CD, if he cannot put any media into the drive, since booting fro it has been disabled, it is either locked or not even installed?
That's a good point, IF the system was configured to not boot from a CD. Even if CD booting is disabled in BIOS, the user can still cut the power, turn it on, and enter single user mode as I stated above. Once you have physical access, game over. It worked in FC4 so I'm sure it will work in other distros.
I still don't see how people say Linux is hard to use. Perhaps it's hard, for some, to administer, but not to use. What "average" windows user do you know that administers his/her own windows box? Those users for the most part just USE the system. Interfaces like KDE match pretty closely to the look and feel of Windows by default. Software installation on Linux is becoming better and better. Even PC-BSD (I know it's not Linux but I'm sure some Linux distros do the same) provides an installer icon for applications (.pbi file) that you just double click, next, next, finish just like Windows.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that if you boot any distro into single-user mode, it would not prompt for the root password. I've seen it automatically dump into a root shell before on some distros (Mandrake comes to mind). With physical access, it's almost pointless to prompt for the root password in single-user mode because if it did, the user could just boot off a liveCD and change the root password anyway.
This vulnerability is the kind of stupid mistake people make sometimes. A brain fart. Nothing really malicious, and not the sign of an incompetent programmer. Something you could've done.
Yes, but shouldn't this kind of "stupid mistake" be caught in testing before the software is released to the public? The use/storage of the root password is something I'd think would be HIGHLY controlled in any distro. I do commend the Ubuntu team for fixing it so quickly, on a Sunday, but it still should NOT have been released to the public in the first place.
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Vista's not that bad, but it's disappointing because of what it _could_ have been. Microsoft took about 5 years to make Vista. Besides eye candy, what does Vista have that XP doesn't? I don't think it has much more to offer. Microsoft removed a lot of features that were originally planned for the OS (WinFS for one). I remember back when they were making all the hype about Longhorn, it was supposed to be a (nearly) complete rewrite of a new "Windows" OS with all these new useful features. In the end, it just seems to be a rehash of XP with a face lift. I guess I wouldn't say Vista is a bad operating system, but it's disappointing that Microsoft couldn't have come up with anything better after so long in development. What features does Vista have that you can't find in an Operating System that already exists? I remember seeing a video on youtube comparing Vista with OS X with the search features, picture/video, etc and it's "not the same". I mean, Vista's search is in the bottom left corner, and OS X's is in the top right corner! I'd do a search for the video but youtube and google video is blocked here at the office.
As part of the installation, Microsoft Windows could provide the user with a radio-button list of possible browsers they can install, and the option of "other" where they can enter a URL to a direct download. The list of browsers, and "other" could be downloaded through a utility similar to wget in Linux from the commandline via a system call. That way the user can pick what they want, but the binaries for the browsers aren't actually provided on the Windows CD. Not that hard.
When I read the skydiving parachute test story, I understood it as... they dropped the parachute out of the plane with only a camera attached, then after the chute crashed on the ground, they had to reassmeble it and rescue the video feed to try and find out why the parachute failed (not taking into account that there wasn't an actual human attached to the parachute that could pull the cord.)
Video cameras can't open parachutes, so of course the test would fail. How many engineers does it take to figure that one out?
Check out the Mono Project. Mono is a .NET implementation on Linux. You will need to make some source code changes to get it to work in Mono, but a lot of the code should work out of the box.
I used Mono to port an in-house application we use here at the office into Mono. Our aplication is in C#, but I believe mono will also do ASP.NET. Someone correct me if I'm wrong? I only had to do some minor code changes to get a majority of our .NET application to work under Gentoo and Ubuntu. Some features had to be disabled, like ActiveX of course. I don't believe ActiveX is supported.
Mod parent up! A lot of people complain about how mainstream distros are getting so bloated because they often come on 3-6 CDs, but they don't take into account how much extra software is included on the CDs. Most if not all of these CDs provide an OS installation that allows you to select what software you want to install and what you don't want.
In the second linked article: "Security vulnerabilities come free with all versions." Sign me up!
I'm not sure I agree about the part with converting game money to real-world money. If I travel to Europe, scam locals out of hundreds of thousands of Euros, then come back to the US and convert this money to US dollars, where do I get punished? Europe? The USA? Both? In this case, both Euros and US Dollars have real value so of course I should be punished somewhere. In an online game, in-game assets don't have any value outside of the game... unless the developers specifically design a way in the game to convert these assets to local currency, and SUPPORT IT. As others have said, Monopoply money has no real world value, so if I steal it, I shouldn't go to jail. If I steal casino chips from someone in Vegas, I SHOULD go to jail.
There are plenty of techniques and schemes people can do in these online games that other players don't like. Take Silkroad Online for example. In this game, you can be a trader to do trade runs between cities for in-game gold profits. If a thief in the game were to "1-star pop" your trade run, stealing around 55,000 gold worth of loot, should this be punishable in the real world? I don't believe this technique was envisioned by the Silkroad developers, and in-game players generally frown upon the practice of 1-star popping. It is unfair to the 1-star trader because the thief is often much higher level and the trader does not stand a chance.
I think if there is no means of translating in-game items to real-world cash, supported by the developers, then real-world rules should not apply. In Silkroad, I can murder a player. Should I be put on trial in a criminal court because the player I murdered happened to be a high level player and leader of a guild that declared war on my guild because of the murder?
It's just a game.
ZOMGROTFLMAOSPLOSION!!!!!111!!1!!111ONE11!!!111 you are SO wrong!!! The more exclamation marks, the better.
That's a good point. I don't think I COULD respond positively to a statement like that. I wouldn't want someone to be that involved in my home's security, monitoring my family's activities, playing with the locks, etc... but if someone was driving by and noticed my front door was open all day, or saw that I had a rope hanging out one of the bedroom windows for someone to climb, I'd want them to let me know. I wouldn't want someone to constantly be brute forcing my ssh server, or hitting my web server with PHP exploits all day to see if there is an exploitable hole, but if someone is legitimately using my server and notices a problem, I'd like to know about it.
We would still need to improve security, not against automated attacks, but against manual ones.
Well all those crimes hurt people/corporations. "Ethical hacking" is capable of occurring without causing damages. If I find a hole in a system for a remote code execution exploit, run code that simply displays a console message on a server, then determine how to fix the hole and inform the system administrator, that seems harmless. It allows the admin to find out about the hole and fix it. Now if I were to run code that roots the box and turns it into a spam bot sending millions of spam emails out wasting large amounts of bandwidth, or code to steal company data, that's another story. Should I be penalized if I go to your house, find out how to break into it, and tell you what I found?
Yeah I know some of those poor, unfortunate souls as well...
That is a good point. There are a lot of possibilities here. If we don't have all the facts, we shouldn't be so quick to judge. The fact of the matter is, Myspace should not be sued because it is not their responsibility to verify users' ages before those users meet offline. This case is all about the money. Next thing we'll see is teenage girls (or guys) suing malls because they met their attacker there.
Granted, it's terrible what happened to the girl, but how is Myspace to blame here? If someone goes to a bar, meets someone, goes back to their place, and gets assaulted, should the victim sue the bar? After all, that's where the victim met the attacker. Is this girl's family going to sue the movie theater and restaurant where they ate and watched a movie? Those businesses didn't do anything to protect her rights either... Myspace does provide *some* protection for minors, if the user is true about their age, but it is not Myspace's responsibility to screen each and every user to verify their true age. There shouldn't even be a lawsuit. Go after the attacker instead.
Well I guess from a software development standpoint, "fixing" the kernel would be the right thing to do. True, this fix does allow the virus to propagate, but the fix makes the kernel work properly. A virus is a program after all, and it should work properly in the operating system just like any other piece of software. :-)
Well configuring the computer to not boot from CD, and locking the tower in a steel cabinet is good physical security, but not everyone does that. I was under the impression that we're talking about the distro itself, whether it's Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora Core, or something else. I verified Fedora works that way with single-user and I am almost certain Mandrake 9.x and 10.0 did as well. I may check Gentoo when I get home if I remember. I wonder if any of the BSDs prompt for the root password on single-user mode. I have PC-BSD, which is basically FreeBSD 6, so I may check that one out too. I'm sure there are some distros, like Debian, that DO prompt for the root password. Indeed it should be seen as a critical security bug to not prompt for it. Windows has the same critical bug, as in you can go into safe mode and by default it doesn't have an administrator password assigned. At least Linux HAS a root password in most cases.
I still don't see how people say Linux is hard to use. Perhaps it's hard, for some, to administer, but not to use. What "average" windows user do you know that administers his/her own windows box? Those users for the most part just USE the system. Interfaces like KDE match pretty closely to the look and feel of Windows by default. Software installation on Linux is becoming better and better. Even PC-BSD (I know it's not Linux but I'm sure some Linux distros do the same) provides an installer icon for applications (.pbi file) that you just double click, next, next, finish just like Windows.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that if you boot any distro into single-user mode, it would not prompt for the root password. I've seen it automatically dump into a root shell before on some distros (Mandrake comes to mind). With physical access, it's almost pointless to prompt for the root password in single-user mode because if it did, the user could just boot off a liveCD and change the root password anyway.
The problem with that is ****** is very easily cracked by password crackers. What ever happened to password complexity?